we still the issues whit 3000l and firmare 4.5.5 all ninght lost the GPs i dont know what happen , how we can determinate this issues
Over 5 years and their onboard sync is still unreliable and yet someone at cambium was like " Hay, our onboard GPS is AWESOME ! So lets not include sync over power on the 3000L ! Is that a good idea or what ?!" and the others at Cambium was like āDuuude, If you smoke weed on a boat, does that make it seaweed? waitā¦ what are we talking aboā¦uhh yeah man sure, lets do that thing you said.ā
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Hmmā¦thats some precious feedback. Thank you. Love the seaweed comment.
On a serious note, why do we make these decisions you ask? It always boils down to cost. Adding sync over power adds cost to the product which we would have to pass onto you at which point it would become a different problem. The onboard GPS is functioning and a good solution. The issue is that overtime we have had two things happen. We initially decided not to add the external puck to the bill of material so as not to increase our cost of the overall solution. Without the puck, the onboard antenna does not have enough gain in many cases to overcome what we have seen to be LTE signal harmonics that interfere with GPS. Actually, that was also the driver as to why not to use the puck as we thought the lower gain of the onboard antenna would actually benefit the situation (actually seen and proven). So, no puck. Now fast forward and we identified a bug/defect that communication between our MCU and SOC was causing issues with GPS signals being lost. Thats what we fixed in 4.5.5 after months of troubleshooting and being mislead by the original LTE interference issue. Long story short, the LTE signal issue is still there and can still be a cause for losing GPS. Whats our plan now? Add the puck to the bill of material and not just any puck but a better puck with built in isolation. So, there are two problems here and we have tackled one and looking at an option to tackle the other one. Hope this background sheds some light on the kind of thinking that goes behind the decisions which to you may seem like completely random. Our goal in this community is always to be transparent and provide good information. Yes, customers can be frustrated and vent every now and then. My request is that donāt make that your standard response/behavior. There is no common good out of that.
Thx
Sakid
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So if using an external puck is the solution when 4.5.5 firmware doesnāt resolve (as I learned this morning after climbing and installing a spare one) - what are we to do about the 40+ 3KL units we have in production?
Do we just wait until each AP has an issue and climb to install a puck? Do we pay for these pucks out of our own pocket?
The issues weāve been experiencing with the 3KL and Force-300 since we decided to re-vamp our network with them have been pretty embarrassing and have left a bad taste in our customers mouths. Most customers that experience issues prefer the consistent (albeit slow) performance of the legacy 450 gear weāre trying to phase out.
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The LTE impact is not on every unit that you deploy I am pretty sure. What you are asking us to do is design products for every possible scenario including future LTE tower installs and subsequent impact of that. By doing that as I stated earlier we would increase cost. I am happy to ship you some pucks and would advise to install them on a case by case basis.
Sakid
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@Sakid_Ahmed, I am setting up a new tower and plan to use 4 3000L APās.
If I order those now will they come with the GPS puck?
I would prefer to set them up right before I haul them up 200 feet.
Thanks,
Rich
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I appreciate the offer of shipping some pucks to us - thank you, weāll certainly take you up on that.
Yes, not all of our APs are having this issue and, yes, I understand that you canāt design a product to suit every possible scenario. However, the fact that youāre going to add these pucks to the bill of materials says to me that they are necessary to perform in a way that you and your customers are happy with. I know thereās nothing that can really be done about the 40+ units we have in production other than climbing and installing pucks if/when they have an issue, but it would be nice to know that we can get these additional pucks (that should have been shipped with the radios) when need them.
Will the puck being added to the future bill of materials increase the cost to us and, if so, by how much?
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Any response to this?
We had another AP drop GPS and not come back this morning.
Currently running on internal timing - not ideal.
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I canāt wait to find out if the new pucks work !
Cambium when the 1000ās series failed - Itās the pucks ! They magnify the noise/interference ! DONāT USE THEM !
Cambium when the 1000ās failed without the pucks - Use the pucks ! But use the new square pucks !
Cambium when the 2000ās failed - Square pucks , but be sure to mount them vertical and with with the cable going down !
3000L - Our onboard sync has been soooo reliable we arenāt even going to include sync-over-power OR a puck ! Cause pucks just cause problems !
3000L - Ok umā¦ yeah put pucks on them, our onboard sync is good when you put a puck on them !
3000L - Ok umā¦yeah, our onboard sync is really good, we have for real 1000% really for sure got it figured out now and the answer is Pucks but a new puck ! We canāt believe someone thought we would have to be high to remove sync-over-power !
Oh please post a pic when you get one cause Iām really hoping they are a different shape, like maybe hex shaped so we can do the whole " what shape puck are you using ? Well thereās your problem youāre using a triangle puck and you should be using the Hex shaped puck !"
Maybe another year or two we will be up to like, star shaped pucks or maybe they can start making them different colorsā¦
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The onboard GPS is functioning and a good solution.
Sync over power has failed us 1 time in 13+ years, just 1 time. In years we have used Ubiquiti AF products I have never had GPS fail a single time.
At any given moment (right now) there are at least 6 ePMP GPS radios that canāt see sats or canāt track the sats they see (we donāt care because they receive sync over power). Right now of the 3 3000Lās still on our network I had to move channels around so I could run one of them without sync because it just suddenly started randomly losing sats a few weeks ago. On two sites were we could not initially use sync over power with 1000 and 2000 GPS APās we tried with pucks, without pucks, square pucks, round pucks, vertically mounted pucks, horizontally mounted pucks , and ePMP onboard GPS continued to fail as it has done for all the years we have used ePMP.
ePMP = literally 100ās or maybe even 1000ās of failures in 5 or 6 years
Packetlfux sync over power = 1 failure in 13 years
Ubiquiti = 0 failures in 5 or 6 years
So, forgive me if I donāt agree that ePMPās onboard GPS is āgoodā.
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Send me your shipping address please.
@Sakid_Ahmed, No response to my question yet?
If I order 3000L now - do they come with pucks? Do I need to order separately? Or are you recommending we use a different manufacturer now? 9 days!!! Simple question. Please respond.
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They do not come with pucks. Heās recommending that you donāt use them unless thereās a bunch of LTE installed at the same site.
No, highly unlikely the ones you will order will have pucks. It takes some time to add the puck to the new stuff and inventory in the channel wonāt have them.
I suggest you go ahead without pucks or I can ship you some.
As I stated before puck helps in some cases but itās not mandatory.
The tower we are using is at the edge of a pretty busy RF-wise area.
There are 3 towers to the North about 1 mile away and 3 towers to the South about 2 miles. Some of these towers do have LTE. Does that sound like a problem environment?
Thanks.
No, most of the problems that people have seen with LTE have been on the same tower or a close/adjacent tower at the same site.
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With one exception non of our towers have a cell tower within a mile, most are 2+ miles from a cell tower. The failing 3000L started without a puck, then we added a puck, square, mounted vertical, on the south side of a steel mast, nearest cell tower is 2.5 miles/3.78km away to the north. Still it fails.
I went and searched the Ubiquiti and Mimosa forums, and googled a bit to see if others were having these issues with GPS. So, admittedly I donāt think a lot of people using Ubiquiti or Mimosa are using GPS sync compared to Cambium users and I didnāt spend a lot of time lookingā¦ but I just didnāt find where anyone else is having these kinds problems with GPS sync randomly failing, for any reason.
So, while the LTE Harmonics thing sounds plausible, I donāt believe it is the cause of more than a tiny fraction of ePMP radios not seeing/tracking Sats.
I already responded and highlighted that we did fix a major issue with GPS in 4.5.5 and 3KL. The only reason we having this whole entire discussion is that someone highlighted that they still have an AP or two exhibiting loss. Majority of reports are that 4.5.5 resolved GOS issues.
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I have 8 3KL radios on my network all running 4.5.5 and 4 of them have GPS issues.
For what its worth, Cambium sent me a few GPS pucks.
They look to be the exact same Unictron model as shipped with 1000 series APs.
It seems when we install the puck on 3KL APs that had GPS issues where powercycling would not resolve, it fixes the issue immediately.
We had 3 more APs drop GPS between my last post and now so naturally we immediately installed every puck they shipped to us. Thereās no planning around when weāll see a GPS failure on a unit and so it makes no sense for us to climb up and install as we encounter the problem.
Even with our monitoring system notifying us of drops, itās really inefficient to tackle these one at a time - not to mention it helps us not piss our customers off even further.
If each of our deployed 3KL units had come shipped with a puck (like Cambium has decided to do moving forward), we most certainly would have installed all of them by now.
I will definitely be bugging Cambium about sending us more pucks for our remaining units and if youāre still having GPS woes I would suggest you do the same.